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Software Makes Objects Disappear in Real Time

CYBERSPACE — A new software technology is able to make objects disappear from a live video — in real time.

Instead of adding digital things, this technology eliminates objects from the real world.

A Virtual Worlds and Digital Games research team at a technical university in Germany calls it Diminishing Reality System. It’s like Adobe Photoshop Content-Aware fill but in real time, using a video camera connected to your computer or smartphone.

The software takes a live video feed, selects an object and reduced the quality of the frames coming from the camera. Then it removes the object from the reduced quality version.

Once this is done, it improves the quality of the result and blends it with the actual frame, which is returned to the viewer in just 41 ms. At this speed, the human brain doesn’t notice any delay.